See where your attention actually goes

Run the log across three consecutive working days. Do not choose a quiet week, and do not restart because a day went badly, because the days that go badly are the ones with the information in them.

Record five fields per entry: arrival time, named source, what it displaced, minutes spent, and whether you returned to the displaced work and how much later. At the end of each day, classify every entry as necessary, useful but poorly timed, unnecessary, avoidable, or self created.

You are finished when you have three complete days, a count by source, and a total of minutes displaced from each of your two or three stated priorities.

This exercise fails in two ways. The first is logging only what other people sent you, which leaves the self created column near-empty and removes the one category you control unilaterally. The second is reconstructing entries at the end of the day, which produces a document that agrees with your memory, which is the document you already had.

Write the two lists of three from memory, compare them against the log, and record the three comparisons in writing: the blind spot, the overlap, and the item that appears on the second list and nowhere in the log.

Then do two things. Name one distraction you will remove, with the date you removed it. Run two protected blocks of forty five minutes on two different days, each preceded by a message to at least one named person telling them when you are unavailable and what to do if something cannot wait, and each followed by a record of what was completed and what arrived while you were gone.

Finally, show the displacement totals to one person: your reader, or the person whose interruptions appear most often in the log. Record what they said, including the part you disagreed with.

The exercise fails if the blocks happen and nobody was told, because an unannounced block is indistinguishable from being unreachable, and the difference between those two is most of what this level is teaching.